What We Believe or THAT We Believe?

Faith - Belief, maybe it's more for us than we really know. It's better for our health, our relationships, our lives. Sometimes I can't tell if it's more important what we believe IN or the having of belief and hope. No brainer, right? But what about 'better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all'? Is that true? Different for each of us?
We can believe people and the world is horrible, plenty of evidence to support it, but does that help anything? We can believe our heavenly father is watching over us and doing all for our good but when everything goes bad, does that mean it would have been better to have never believed it? I want to only believe things that are true...but I don't have all the facts that exist.

A few days ago I read a book I picked up from a used bookstore, it's called Mortal Memory by Thomas Cook. The story is about a man who was the sole survivor of his father's murder spree of his own family; evidence showed the dad had waited for two hours for the main character (a little boy at the time) to come home from school. The boy was spending the afternoon at a friend's house and that was what apparently saved his life. But what kind of life? He grew up, married, had a child, lived a normal life until some woman writing a book on family killers that tried to escape instead of making it a murder-suicide showed up with questions. She ended up taking this guy back into this horrifying memories until the guy started going crazy himself. His fury and hatred of what had been done to him and the strangeness and also the normalness of his childhood was always run through this defining trauma.

Nothing about that is strange but the way it turned out made me really think. Once the man started living in the past and constantly reviewing these memories, he started seeing his current life and family differently, started feeling like his father must have felt. It was hard to tell if he was going to do the same thing, if he had been part of it as a child or what.
It was sad to see him looking at his life so differently as he was led into deeply considering how his father could do such a thing, made me want that woman author to go away and leave him alone! And then the real shocker was: his father hadn't done it after all.

This man spent all this time thinking he had started feeling what his father had apparently felt, believing he had no real hope in life either, let his life fall apart and lost everything...for nothing. It was all because of what the situation looked like to the police and the extended family and therefore what the little boy grew up believing.